PART III.

2. (a) The Old Northern Vowels in the Loanwords.
Short Vowels, Long
Vowels, Diphthongs.

(b) The Old Northern Consonants.

* * * *
*

PART I.

INTRODUCTION.

1. GENERAL REMARKS.

Worsaae’s list of 1400 place-names in England
gives us an idea of the extent, as well as the distribution
of Scandinavian settlements in the 9th and 10th centuries.
How long Scandinavian was spoken in England we do
not know, but it is probable that it began to merge
into English at an early date. The result was
a language largely mixed with Norse and Danish elements.
These are especially prominent in the M.E. works “Ormulum,”
“Cursor Mundi,” and “Havelok.”
We have historical records of the Danes in Central
and Eastern England. We have no such records
of Scandinavian settlements in Northwestern England,
but that they took place on an extensive scale 300
place-names in Cumberland and Westmoreland prove.
In Southern Scotland, there are only about 100 Scandinavian
place-names, which would indicate that such settlements
here were on a far smaller scale than in Yorkshire,
Lincolnshire, or Cumberland—­which inference,
however, the large number of Scandinavian elements
in Early Scotch seems to disprove. I have attempted
to ascertain how extensive these elements are in the
literature of Scotland. It is possible that the
settlements were more numerous than place-names indicate,
that they took place at a later date, for instance,
than those in Central England. Brate showed that
the general character of Scandinavian loanwords in
the Ormulum is East Scandinavian. Wall concludes
that it is not possible to determine the exact source
of the loanwords in modern English dialects because
“the dialect spoken by the Norsemen and the
Danes at the time of settlement had not become sufficiently
differentiated to leave any distinctive trace in the
loanwords borrowed from them, or (that) neither race
preponderated in any district so far as to leave any
distinctive mark upon the dialect of the English peasantry.”
It is true that the general character of the language
of the two races was at the time very much the same,
but some very definite dialectal differentiations had
already taken place, and I believe the dialectal provenience
of a very large number of the loanwords can be determined.
Furthermore, the distribution of certain place-names
indicates that certain parts were settled more especially
by Danes, others by Norsemen. The larger number
of loanwords in Wall’s “List A” seem
to me to be Danish. My own list of loanwords
bears a distinctively Norse stamp, as I shall show
in Part III. of this work. This we should also
expect, judging from the general character of Scandinavian
place-names in Southern Scotland.